I got a wild hair yesterday. I'm not sure anybody cares about this anymore today. But it was interesting. (This has nothing to do with food, by the way.)
I decided to try to call every rabbi in Alabama to see if any of them had ever fellowshipped with Roy and Kayla Moore, as the latter claimed in her now-infamous "one of our attorneys is a Jew" speech.
(Only one of the attorneys? Why not a whole team? Also, who are these people seeing for medical care?)
There aren't a ton of rabbis in Alabama, so calling them all seemed feasible. Congregations are disappearing. The younger generation has intermarried, moved away. The synagogue in Gadsden, where Roy Moore is from, closed in 2010. (It was fire-bombed by a Nazi in 1960.)
In Dothan, a guy started paying Jews to move there because he was worried his synagogue and community were dying. It kind of worked. nytimes.com/2013/10/14/us/…
One rabbi I talked to guessed there are maybe 20 rabbis in the state. I didn't get to all of them, and I only heard back from about six before the sun set and Hanukkah was upon us.
One rabbi tried to get me to move to Birmingham. It sounds really nice. (He gets his kosher food shipped from Florida and keeps it in a massive freezer. One temple's website has a link to buy kosher wine. If you want to be observant in Alabama, you have to work for it a little.)
One rabbi wouldn't talk politics. He did talk about tikkun olam, repairing the world through one's own actions. "V’ahavta l’rayacha kamocha," he said: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." The whole Torah can be boiled down to that, Hillel said. The rest is just commentary.
He talked about empathy and the menorah as a symbol for the spark within each of us. It wasn't what I called to talk about. I didn't mind.
One synagogue's administrative assistant took a message. Has the rabbi ever fellowshipped with Roy and Kayla Moore, I asked. "Baby, I don't think so," she said and laughed hard.
"Sorry, it's not me," one rabbi said. "I have not had any contact with Roy Moore or his wife," e-mailed another, who mentioned he had just seen the movie "Spotlight." "Most of the Jews here are liberals," another told me.
Everyone's best guess for the rabbi to whom Kayla Moore was referring was a man named Noson Leiter, who believed Roy Moore would face off against "the gay terrorists" and that Moore has a track record of fighting for public policy based on "biblical values and not perversion."
Leiter has also been in the news for saying Hurricane Sandy was "divine justice" on account of New York's being so gay and all.
Maybe the Moores may have a "one Jew per category" policy -- one attorney friend, one rabbi friend.
Anyway, I didn't find a rabbi who had fellowshipped with the Moores. Or one who had even met them. Their loss, because the rabbis I talked to were kind and generous and full of empathy. Today might be a good day for the Moores to reach out.
